One day in 1768 a bare-breasted
Tahitian girl climbed from her canoe to a French ship under the hot-eyed gaze of
400 French sailors who had not seen any woman at all for over six months. she
stepped to the quarterdeck where, pausing at a hatchway, she slipped the flimsy
cloth pareu from her hips, and stood utterly naked and smiling at the
men. Down went the anchor, and in that moment the myth of romantic Tahiti was
conceived, a paradise of fruit trees, brown tits and kiddie porn. Like Venus
rising from the waves - that was how the naked girl was described by the captain
of the ship, Louis Antoine de Bougainville, the first Frenchman in Tahiti, who
believed he had discovered heaven on earth ("I thought I was transported into
the garden of Eden"), the abode of Venus, the Island of Love.

Now I had a similar experience in
Tahiti, involving stark nakedness, the lagoon, the hot-eyuedgaze, and an
outrigger canoe, but in its suddenness and coloration this incident was more up
to date and more representative of Tahiti today. And I was the one in the
outrigger canoe. After a day or so rattling around the streets of Papeete,
Tahiti's capital, I rented an outrigger from a Frenchman (he called it his "petite
pirague") and paddled for a day to Tahiti-Iki - "Little Tahiti," the
volcanic bulge that is attached to the eastern shore of the island. The ancient
name of the island of Tahiti is Tahiti-nui-i-te-vai-uri-rau, "Great
Tahiti of the Many-Coloured Waters."

The name is apt. The lagoon beneath
Tahiti's dead green volcanoes is a luminous varying blue, not sea-water colored,
but with glittering opalescent depths, and elsewhere shallow coral shelves,
white and knobbed like bones, rippling with fish. Overall the water is limped
and unexpectedly bright, like those candy-coloured liqueurs made from berries,
cordials that are so pretty in the squat glass bottled in a bar that just
looking at them cools you and takes away your thirst. The surface of Tahiti's
lagoon was spangled with stars of sunlight. A mile or so offshore was the reef,
being pounded by surf that was so heavy it had the muffled boom of distant
cannon fire, and it ringed the entire island with a white flash of foam.

Tahiti has its drawbacks - it is
expensive, traffic-choked, noisy, corrupt and Frenchified - but it is impossible
to belittle its natural physical beauty, and in site of the car exhausts there
is nearly always in the air the fragrant aroma - the noanoa - of flowers,
the tiare especially, a tiny white gardenia that is Tahiti's national blossom.
Visitors are full of complaints, though. Just that morning, on the public
vehicle they call le truck (a cross between a mammy-wagon and a school bus, and
"Tahiti's only bargain) I had fallen into conversation with a man from Maryland.
His name was Don Kattwinkel - he wore a get-acquainted badge - and he was
obviously a sucker for carvings, from the look of his war club and his
letter-opener. He was on the three-day tour, just arrived at Faa'a a few days
ago - today Tahiti, tomorrow New Zealand. And he tried to sum up Tahiti for me.

"No one smiles here," he said. "And you can't
drink the water."

I broke it to him gently that both were
half-truths. The locals smiled at each other, even if they didn't smile at
us, and they boiled their water before drinking it. Don made no comment on
that. He said, "You sound like you're from Australia."

I wanted to tell him that people have been
killed for uttering an uncalled-for libel like that. "You're sure not from
Mass," he went on. "I know that dialect." I was thinking about this
irritating fart while I was paddling my canoe - nothing like meeting a man
like that to preoccupy yourself. there was a current campaign put on by the
Polynesian Tourist Board called Put On A Smile! - encouraging Polynesians to
smile at tourists, mostly Japanese, none of whom smiled themselves. Is there
a Japanese smile that does not seem like an expression of pain?

By mid-afternoon I had paddled halfway around
this part of the island, and was nearing the village of Atimaono. It was not
much of a place, but it was the setting of one of Jack London's
masterpieces, his story "The Chinago." In the story some Chinese laborers -
"Chinagos" - are accused of murder, and though all are innocent of the crime
they are found guilty by the French magistrate and one, Ah Chow, is
sentenced to hang. Another, Ah Cho, is given twenty years in a prison
colony, but one morning he is taken to this village. Atimaono, and told that
he is to be beheaded. He protests to the various gendarmes - it is a case of
mistaken identity, because the names are so similar - and at last, pleading
for his life and proving he is not the condemned man, he is believed. but
the French officials confer. They have come a long way from Papeete. The
guillotine is ready. Five hundred other laborers have been assembled to
watch. A postponement to find the right man would mean being bawled out by
the French bureaucrats for inefficiency and time-wasting. Also it is a very
hot day and they are impatient.

All this time Ah Cho listens and watches. At
last, but kn owing they have the wrong man, one French policeman says, "Then
let's go on with it. They can't blame us. Who can tell one Chinago from
another? We can say that we merely carried out instructions with the Chinago
that was turned over to us ..."

And, still making excuses, the French strap down the
innocent Chinese man and strike off his head. "The French, with no instinct for
colonization," London writes at one point, and that is the subject of the grim
story.

An hour past Atimaono was the harbour of Port Phaeton.
In a lovely garden by the sea was the Gauguin Museum, but in spite of its name
it contained no paintings by Gauguin, only a haunted grimacing tiki. Farther on,
the village of Papearl was said to be the first settlement of the seagoing
people who originally landed on Tahiti and it lay next to the piece of land,
like a pinched waist, where Little Tahiti was attached to Big Tahiti. but it was
all so suburban. One of the curious facts of Tahitian life was that strictly
speaking there were few usable beaches on the island - the public ones were
dismal and littered, the others were the property of proprietorial Tahitian
villages. Looking toward the island from the lagoon, I could see that the coast
was an unbroken stretch of bungalows and villas, one enormous attenuated suburb
that encircled the whole of Tahiti. Undermined by French aid programs, and
besieged by French construction companies, the Polynesians have abandoned their
traditional house=-building. The houses were extremely unattractive and they
were packed cheek by jowl along the coast, surrounded by chain link fences and
walls which needed no translation, and the French houses had security cameras
and signs saying Attention Chien Mechant! (Beware of the Fierce Dog!).

Earlier in the day, paddling ear Punaauia, I had passed
a pair of fares, or traditional huts, but there were not many others like them
in the whole of French Polynesia. I was so interested in them that I went ashore
there and was told that these two at the edge of the beach at Punaauia were
owned by the Swede Bengt Danielsson, who had run aground in Polynesia forty-odd
years ago on the raft Kon-Tiki. In his book recounting the adventure,
Thor Heyerdahl wrote, "Bengt was right, this was heaven," and Bengt stayed in
Polynesia.

"Monsieur Danielsson is on holiday in Sweden," a
Tahitian woman on the lawn told me. I was sorry to miss him, because Danielsson
and his French-born wife Marie-Therese have courageously fought a vocal battle
against French nuclear testing in the Pacific, and in this small and
politicallyh incestuous French colony Danielsson has been threatened, obstructed
and shunned. Yet he perseveres in publishing to the world the fact that the
French have been continually detonating nuclear devices - 160 so far - in one of
the world's most fragile ecosystems, a coral atoll, nuking it to pieces killing
fish and causing cancer. Perhaps it was just as well that I did not engage
Danielsson on this subject of French colonialism, because just a short trip to
any French territory in he Pacific is enough to convince even the most casual
observer that the French are among the most self-serving, manipulative,
trivial-minded, obnoxious, cynical and corrupting nations on the face of the
earth.

It is true that America has overwhelmed its own
territory in Samoa and made it a welfare state, but Samoans have emigrated
wholesale to the mainland United States, where they flourish or fail, according
to their abilities. There is no profit in Samoa for us. But Polynesia is all
profit for the French - they need the land and the distance to capitalize on
world air routes for French airlines, and they need Polynesia as a military
garrison, and - most profitable of all - they need nuclear testing facilities
for their arms industry. As an old-fashioned colony it is a racket. The French
effort is devoid of idealism. Only a minuscule number of Polynesians ever make
it to metropolitan France to qualify as doctors or administrators - the French
run the entire show. but the patronizing racism inherent in French colonial
policy has not had the demoralizing effect that was intended. They planted
themselves in the islands and consistently discriminated against Polynesians and
refused to learn their language - there was a law passed to French Polynesia in
the 1960s forcing Polynesians and Chinese to take French names so they could be
more easily pronounced. In the way, the French turned most of these friendly
people into sullen adversaries and some into lapdogs. but though they have lost
most of their traditional skills of weaving and house-building and fishing and
sailing, the Polynesians have retained their oral culture - and that is a good
thing, because no one needs their culture more than colonized people. What else
do they have?

The Polynesians paid lip-service to the French and so
the French truly believed they had subverted the islanders. but in fact they
only made a greater burden for themselves. by encouraging the islanders to be
"colorful" they distanced themselves. The French are at their most obvious,
their most bourgeois and sentimental when they are dealing with people they
regard as savages, but it seem to be a fact that sentimentality is a trait one
always finds in bullies and brutes. The honest thing, in dealing with Tahiti,
would be to discuss French Polynesia as a depressing political problem, because
it has been a French colony for 150 years. Everything else ought to be
irrelevant - that is, whether the beaches are pleasant and the food is tasty,
and the hotels are comfortable, and what's the music like? The very fact of
politics mattering in the Pacific seems strange - few people in other islands
care about politics - yet it is the only place in the Pacific where there is a
political situation. It is a characteristic of colonies that unless political
life is manipulated or made ineffectual the place won't work.

But it is all so boring. I liked Pacific islanders
generally for the way they guffawed at politicians - I admired their sense of
family, their practicality, their usual indifference to world events. They were
out of the mainstream, on the other side of the world - the brighter, happy
side. For those with televisions, "Operation Desert Storm" had been to them not
much more than a nightly entertainment video. That attitude seemed informed by a
healthy combination of wisdom and vulgarity, and a taste for sensationalism -
but most of the world's couch potatoes are much the same. There was always a
mixture of motives among Polynesians: they made you feel at home and then they
stole from you. If you complained, they would say that it was nothing personal -
and if you couldn't afford it, what were you doing here, so far from home, in
the first place? Colonial politics was just another complication. Yes, the
French built court-houses and schools, but the French colonialists needed such
institutions far more than Tahitians did. I just kept wishing that the French
were a bit nicer and more generous, and weren't so keen on nuking everything in
sight. They said they had to - for world peace, but that was merde. The
French arms industry, third largest in the world, and exporter of nuclear
technology, now more than ever depended on extensive nuclear testing.

I paddled past Bengt Danielsson's two thatched-roof
fares. Buffeted by the trade winds - the wind never ceases to blow in Polynesia
- I kept within the reef, glorifying in the sight of the lovely island of Moorea,
in mountains looming dark and spiky - local myths claimed they were the dorsal
fins of giant fish, but the island looked to me like a seagoing dragon, crossing
the channel known as the Sea of the Moon. It was then, squinting into the
intense glare of a cloudless oceanic afternoon - the sun slanted into my eyes -
that I saw a small raft drifting perilously near the reef. There were some inert
specks on it - humans probably - but it was the oddest possible place for a raft
to be. If it went on drifting it would be smashed to pieces by surf. It had no
mast or sail, nor was anyone paddling it. I had the idea that it had broken free
of a ship and that somehow it had floated through a break in the reef. What was
beyond question was that it was hardly visible from shore. The only reason I
could see the raft was because I was in a seaworthy outrigger canoe and paddling
along the margin of the reef.

You sometimes heard stories of the ordeal of the people
on such rafts, how their expensive yacht had been sunk by a killer whale, and
how the quarreling castaways had clung to the wreckage for days or weeks,
praying for deliverance, until, one sunny morning, the batt3red thing hove into
view on a tropical shore, where holiday-minded families frolicked with beach
balls, the raft looking as though it had floated straight out of Poe's Narrative
of Arthur Gordon Pym, and it was immediately, grotesquely clear that the
survivors had made it through by using each other with the utmost barbarity -
human bones, scraps of flesh and the evidence of cannibalism. "Daddy, what's
wrong with those people?" - one of those rafts. That made me paddle faster, and
I could see that there were only two figures on board and that I was gaining on
the raft. It excited me to thing that I might be the first person to witness the
arrival of the desperate craft in Tahiti, and I alone would hear their ordeal -
what a piece of luck for someone like me, who intended to write about these
islands where in the normal way nothing much happened. Now I could see that the
two figures on the raft were lying flat, as though protrate from the sun, and
there was something melancholy about the solitariness of their situation -
within the reef and yet still so far from shore. You could drown, or starve, or
die of thirst, or suffocate with heat exhaustion, even in the bewitchingly
lovely place.

I had a water bottle and the remains of my lunch in my
boat - enough to revive them, I was sure. They were upwind, so they did not hear
the thrashing of my canoe, but I was soon close enough to recognize the
strangeness of this simple raft. It was not drifting; it was tethered to a
;mooring. Apart from the two people, there was nothing else on it, not an object
of any kind - no flag, no scraps, no bones, no bucket, nothing - nor any
clothes. There were two skinny women on the raft and they were asked. As I drew
near - I was only thirty feet away - some warning vibration of my maleness must
have charged the air - suddenly each woman sat up straight. Or had they heard my
paddling? They were young, in their twenties, rather pretty and, from their
demeanor, French. They were browner than any Tahitian I had seen - the gleaming
darkness of the most lizard-like sunbather. It was the sort of tanning that made
you think of leather. Seeing me, they arranged their bodies compactly, as
modestly as they could, folded themselves with ingenious economy, their knees
drawn up under their chins, and their feet jammed together, and they hugged
themselves, like monkeys squatting in the rain. To preserve their modesty, I did
not go much closer, and yet I was close enough to be able to marvel at their
nakedness, at the exoticism of this sight - a pair of nymphs on a bobbing raft
in the Tahitian lagoon.

"Hello," I said, trying to be jaunty, so as not to
alarm them. But it had a hollow sound - and I realized it was just the sort of
thing a rapist or voyeur might say to give false reassurance to his victim. They
narrowed their eyes, their gaze did not meet mine, and their tense posture, with
this grim indifference (which I took to be fear and apprehension), was meant to
shame me. They wanted me to go away, of course. And now I saw a Tahitian
fisherman, trolling from a small motor-boat. He looked up and leered at the
crouching sunbathers. they shrank from him, too, and wished him away. It
irritated me that they felt we had no right to go bobbing past them - that,
simply because they had taken all their clothes off, they regarded themselves as
inviolate, and treated this part of the lagoon (which belonged to everyone) as
their private property. For that reason I lingered and then I left, paddling
onward towards Papeete. There I was told that this was a fairly common practice
- a French thing, women sunbathing nude in order to eliminate bathing-suit
silhouettes on their skin. A speed-boat dropped them on the raft and returned
two or three hours later to take them back to their hotel.

It was dangerously silly to lie naked under this
blistering Oceanic sun, and there was not a single Polynesian who would dare it.
Apart from being bad for the skin, and a cause of premature wrinkling, if not
cancer, it was blatant immodesty. Once upon a time the Tahitian had reveled in
nakedness and seduced European sailors and tempted them from their stern duties
on shipboard. ("... for when we were sent away, 'Huzza for Otaheite!' was
frequently heard among the mutineers," Captain Bligh wrote bitterly, after
seeing his ship the Bounty headed back to Papeete and the local women.) But
these days only the tourists went naked, and the bare tits you saw were always
those of visiting sunbathers. The Tahitians were all covered up and decent;
history's wheel had taken a complete turn, the fantasies were reversed, and now
it was the Christian Tahitians who leered, and the pagan French who were naked.

As soon as the nameless Tahitian girl on Bougainville's
ship dropped her flimsy cloth in full view of the impressionable sailors,
Tahiti's fate was sealed, and the South Sea Island myth was born. Ogling a
woman's private parts is the Frenchman's version of a glimpse of paradise in any
case, but to these horny and fanciful sailors this was even better - the woman
was a dusky maiden, just the sort of uncorrupted savage living in her natural
state that Rousseau had described only fifteen years earlier. Captain
Bougainville was ecstatic. He paid Tahitian women his highest compliment: "for
agreeable features (they) are not inferior to most European women, and who on
the point of beauty of the body might, with much reason, vie with them all." He
wrote that the naked girl on board "appeared to the eyes of all beholders, such
as Venus showed herself to the Phrygian shepherd, having indeed, the celestial
form of the goddess."

From that moment - and Bougainville encourage the view
- Tahiti was known as the New Cytherea, the abode of Venus. When Venus Aphrodite
rose from the sea foam she stepped ashore (according to he poet Hesiod) at
Cythera, in Ionia. This naked Tahitian girl was Venus made flesh, a goddess of
love and beauty, the physical embodiment of the life force. But there was more.
Every detail of Tahiti excited Bougainville, and when he settled down to write
about his voyage he described how like the world before the Fall this island
seemed, and he used Rousseau's precise expression "the golden age" for this
uncorrupted place: Polynesia was one of "those countries where the golden age is
still in use." Even the creatures associated with the mythology of Venus could
be found in Tahiti. The dolphin, the tortoise and the gentlest birds were sacred
to Venus - and there the captain had found them in the very spot where this
dusky Venus smiled upon him. More than that, more rousing than the unashamed
nakedness, were the sexual practices - and they were of the most unfamiliar
kind. This seemed to be an island of exhibitionists. Officers and sailors
invited into the islanders' houses were given food and afterwards the Tahitians
"offered them young girls." Neighbours crowded into the house, music was played,
the floor was spread with leaves and flowers, and the Europeans were encouraged
to strip naked and make love to the girls, there and then, under the approving
eyes of the islanders. "Here Venus is the goddess of hospitality, her worship
does not permit of any mysteries, and every tribute paid to her is a feast for
the whole nation." In short, public copulation, group sex, fruit trees and
freedom.

The islands were bountiful and lovely, and what
distinguished them from all other happy islands on earth was their dedication to
free and joyous and unsentimental sexuality. Captain Cook was shocked by what he
saw in Tahiti, and he wrote, "There is a scale of dissolute sensuality which
these people have ascended, wholly unknown to every other nation whose manners
have been recorded from the beginning of the world to the present hour, and
which no imagination could possibly conceive." One one occasion in Tahiti, in a
presentation that was organized by the islanders for the amusement of the
foreigners, Cook and some of his men watched a naked six-foot Tahitian man
copulate with a fourteen-year-old girl, and he noted that neither was
embarrassed - indeed, the young girl was skilled in the arts of love.
Bougainville's extremely well-written Voyage Around the World (1771) made
Tahiti a byword for everything beautiful. The book was quickly translated into
English, and it delighted and inspired - and stimulated - its readers. Just a
few years after the book appeared, James Boswell got a hankering to go to
Tahiti, and he mentioned this to Dr Johnson, who told him not to bother, because
"one set of Savages is like another."

"I do not think the people of Otaheite can be
reckoned Savages," Boswell said.

"Don't cant in defense of Savages," Johnson
replied.

"They have the art of navigation," Boswell
said.

"A dog or a cat can swim," Johnson said.

Boswell persisted: "They carve very
ingeniously."

"A cat can scratch, and a child with a nail can
scratch," Johnson said.

But Boswell was right, and he went on yarning to go to
Tahiti, in order to "be satisfied what pure nature can do for man."

The Tahitians were anything but primitive. They were
among the greatest navigators the world has ever known. They had been brilliant
stone-carvers and masons. At Papara they had raised a large eleven-step pyramid,
the Mahaiatea Marae, and there were more temples and altars at Paea and on the
island of Moorea. The people whom Wallis, Bougainville and Captain Cook met
(these captains visited Tahiti within three years of each other) were skilled in
the arts of wars, of boat-building, and navigation. And far from depending on
the fruit trees of the island for their food, they practiced complex and
organized cultivation - growing yams, sweet potatoes, gourds and sugar cane they
raised pigs and chickens, and dogs - they preferred dog meat to pork. Speaking
of the first Europeans in Polynesia, Fernand Braudel wrote (in The Structures
of Everyday Life): "But were the savages they described really primitive
people? Far from it." Yet to nearly everyone, the sophistication of the
Tahitians was the least interesting thing about them.

Because of its reputation for innocent sex, for pretty
people in a pretty place, Tahiti has been one of the most inspirational pieces
of geography in the world. Even writers who never saw it praised it - Lord
Byron, who wrote a poem about it ("The Island"), and the philosopher Diderot
(cribbing from Bougainville) set a novel there. Melville made his reputation by
writing about it in Typee and Omoo, and Robert Louis Stevenson
vastly preferred it to Samoa. Most of the people who subsequently wrote about it
described it in much the same terms as Bougainville. Pierre Loti went one better
and in the purplest prose imaginable described his marriage to a Tahitian; after
reading this book, Paul Gauguin was encouraged to set sail. They were all male
writers, of course; it would have been interesting if someone like Edith Wharton
or Simone de Beauvoir had gushed in quite this way about Tahiti.

Even the sexually ambiguous Somerset Maugham regarded
Papeete as pleasant - but he had reason to feel lucky for having gone there. He
had sailed to Tahiti after Samoa (which he hadn't liked much) in order to
collect material about Gauguin for his novel The Moon and Sixpence. This was in
1917, only thirteen years after Gauguin's death, and so memories were still
fresh. Indeed, one old woman remembered that the obnoxious Frenchman had painted
the glass panels of a door in a decrepit village house. Maugham went immediately
to the house, where the door was still hinged and swinging, and bought it from
the innocent owner for 900 francs (he later sold it for $37,400). Years later,
Gauguin's son Emil, an overweight buffoon, was a colorful local character. Emil
hung around the bars of Papeete, and visitors bought him drinks and badgered him
for information about his father (whom he had never known), and for ten francs
he let you take his picture. For literary reasons, Maugham regarded Tahiti as a
seductive place (Gauguin certainly didn't, which was why he abandoned it for the
Marquesas). It is questionable whether all Tahitians were ever as sexy as
Bougainville described - he was only on the island a matter of days, his ship
anchored off Hitiaa - but proof of the power of this book is the fact that
Tahiti in particular and Polynesian islands in general are still regarded as
Cytherean. Yet, manifestly, they are not. Pleasant and feckless, yes, paradise,
no.

Bougainville's descriptions stimulated two quite
different sorts of people, polar opposites actually - adventurers eager to taste
the Cytheran delights of willing women, and missionaries determined to clothe
and convert the islanders to Christianity. Over two hundred years later, these
people are still contending for the souls of Polynesians. but for every Melville
or Gauguin, or Don Kattwinkel on the six-day Polynesian package-tour ("Features
include welcome flower leis"), or anyone else searching out a seductress, there
are many more zealots with fire in their eyes who have made it their life's work
to convince these people that they are imbued with Original Sin. No adventurer's
book is complete without an attack on missionaries - Melville despised and
ridiculed them for their subversion and hypocrisy, no missionary's memoir omits
to mention the sinfulness and opportunism of beach-combers and remittance men.
Each saw the other was a corrupter.

It is almost axiomatic that as soon as a place gets a
reputation for being paradise it goes to hell. Tahiti seemed to me dramatically
beautiful, but is population lived entirely on the fringes of its steep and
inaccessible slopes; and so it seemed small and crowded. It was full of French
soldiers and expatriate bureaucrats cashing in on the fact that overseas
salaries were double what they were in France and here there was no income tax.
The businessmen were a perpetual scowl of disappointment, because business was
so poor. the hotel-owners and tour-operators complained that tourism was off
twenty to thirty percent. Even in its great days Tahiti prospered because of
French aid rather than from the receipts of tourism, but if it was ever to
become independent it needed to make a show of self-sufficiency. by the 1980s it
had become noticeably poorer and more careworn. The bureaucrats were overpaid,
but the place itself was undercapitalized, and the locals were penetrated by
the aimlessness and vague resentment that characterizes most colonial people.
Treat people like children and they become infantile and cranky. The clearest
evidence of this was the government's official Put On ASmile!
campaign.

Another campaign - the Tourist board was unimaginative
but desperate to please - was a contest to find "the most hospitable Tahitian"
who would qualify for a Mauruuru (Thank You Very Much) Award. Visitors to
French Polynesia were encouraged to write letters to the Tahiti Sun Press
recommending a person who had impressed them. I found the letters laughable but
engaging, as they described a particularly helpful bellhop or swimming pool
attendant or taxi-driver. One day, I read laudatory letter from some visiting
Americans (Mr and Mrs Albert Crisp, from Los Angeles) who had spent a week in
Moorea:

Since our stay at the Hotel Bali Hai in Moorea we
have enjoyed meeting and getting to know Helene ("Mimi") Theroux,
a sweet girl who tends bar.

Mimi Theroux is extremely friendly and helpful, and
we would like to show our gratitude by nominating her for a Maururu
Award. She works very hard and this is to show our appreciation.

Seeing your own strange, hard-to-spell name correctly
printed on the pages of a Tahitian newspaper can give you a powerful sense of
belonging to the islands. And it is a belief in my family that every person with
that surname is a relation - a descendant of Peter Therous (1839-1915) of
Yamaska, Quebec, who had nine prolific sons, Henri, Louis, Ovide, Leon, Dorel,
Joseph, Peter, Alexandre, and my grandfather, Eugene. I immediately called the
Hotel Bali Hai and asked to speak to my cousin.

"Mimi Theroux doesn't work here anymore," the manager
told me. He thought I might find her somewhere in Moorea, but he wasn't sure. he
promised to find her address for me. I planned to paddle around Moorea sometime
soon, and I vowed that I would seek out Mademoisell - or was it Madame? -
Theroux, when I got to that island. Two things kept me in Tahiti for the moment
- the arrangements I was making to go to the distant Marquesas on a freighter,
and the prospect of watching the Bastille Day parade. I also wondered whether I
ought to get a tattoo in this the homeland of tattoos - even the word was
Polynesian (tatu means "puncture"). The idea of a tattoo on my ankle
seemed an inoffensive way of satisfying my curiosity, but the sight of the only
tattooist in Papeete, an excitable Belgian in a bloodstained room, made me
change my mind.

Papeete is rather an ugly, plundered-looking town. Its
buildings are scruffy, and flimsy and ill-assorted, and they clutter the lower
slopes of the extinct volcanoes. Aorai and Orohena, that rise six or seven
thousand feet behind it. Tahiti's road - there is only one narrow one,
inevitably a speedway, that encircles the island - is quite famously bad and
dangerous. To complete this unromantic picture, Tahiti I found to be one the
most expensive places I have ever visited - a pack of cigarettes is $5, a liter
of petrol $4, the simplest cotton shirt $90, and a meal in a good restaurant
almost prohibitive, but as there are few good restaurants this is academic; and
yet if you decide to have a pizza instead you will be paying about twice what
you would at the Pizza Hut in Boston. there is no income tax in French
Polynesia, yet indirect taxation can be just as brutal. You may congratulate
yourself that you don't smoke or drink alcohol, yet even the most frugal
vegetarian is in for a shock when he sees the Tahitian cabbages (grown in
California) priced at $8 in Papeete's central market.

But for the Tahitians themselves the price of cabbage
was academic. The islanders, who were always tidy and clean - impressively so,
in a place where fresh water was scarce - managed to survive, and even to
flourish, by cultivating small vegetable gardens and applying for welfare and
using the extended family. They were a chunky breed, and I felt that there was
perhaps something assertive in their obesity. They seemed to revel in being a
different size and shape from their colonial masters or mistresses - apart from
enthusiastic teenagers, who were imitative, there was almost no emulation among
Tahitians of French physical types or styles - no joggers, no fashion
casualties, no snobs or socialites. Few of them were even smokers. The
Tahitian's most obvious indulgence was a kind of relentless snacking - they were
forever munching and manipulating Planter's Cocktail Nuts, potato sticks, Porky
Snaks (Porc Frites), Rashuns (friles au bacon), Kellogg's Corn
Pops, Figolu Fig Newtons, Champagne Crispy Sponge fingers, Cadbury's Crunchies,
Pinkys, Moros and Double Fudge Chocolate Biscuits, Toscas, Millefeuilles and
Tiki crousti-legers, and Cheez Balls at five bucks a five-ounce can. to
pay for this they spent their welfare checks or else got jobs cat3ring to the
dwindling number of tourists, few of whom were big spenders. but even the
poorest, scrounging Tahitian did not solicit tips and regarded tipping as one of
the more insulting of foreign habits.

Tahiti was typical of Oceania generally in the
frugality of its long-term expatriates - it seemed through a kind of caution,
not to say fear, that these people saved their money. Because people were so
vulnerable, they made a point of not appearing to be well-off - it was
altogether too easy for anyone to be burgled. There were retirees here, but they
had gone to ground - they hid in bungalows deep in the valleys of Tahiti and
Moorea. There were always yachties in Papeete harbor, but yacht people the world
over are notoriously careful with their money - circumstances forces them to be
self-sufficient. Elsewhere on the island, the villages were fenced
off and seemed contented, and the most conspicuous people in Papeete - apart
from Japanese tourists and French soldiers - were the two sorts of folk who had
been there since Bougainville described it as paradise: the adventurers and and
the missionaries; the drunks and the God-botherers. At any time of day in
downtown Papeete it was possible to see a sanctimonious clergyman passing a bar
where a wrecked-looking Frenchman was sitting glumly over a bottle of Hinano
beer. It was still possible to go to pieces here, any number of Frenchmen had
married teenaged Tahitians, given them six kids, and turned them into
twenty-year-old bags, thus keeping alive the South Sea Island myth.

I had longed to be in Tahiti for Bastille Day and I
made a point of lingering on the island to witness the parade. Rather
disingenuously the French authorities on the island had converted Bastille Day
into a gala they called Heiva Tahiti, the Tahiti Festival - they hadn't
the guts to come clean and celebrate their independence day in full view of
people who had yet to gain their freedom. I expected it to be a wonderful
example of colonial comedy and hypocrisy and it was, "Sponsored by Toyota." To
make matters even more puzzling, the posters announced in French The 109th
Tahiti Annual July Festival, and to work this out you had to go to a history
book and establish that it was in 1880 that Ariane (PomareV), the son of the
intransigent Queen Pomare (IV), was pressured by the French into abdicating and
handed his entire administration over to France, who proclaimed the island a
French colony. with an astounding insensitivity the French had conflated the
dates, and the Tahitians were being persuaded to celebrate the anniversary of
their subjection on the very day the 'French celebrated their own freedom.

At eight o'clock in Bastille Day morning I joined the
crowd of impassive Tahitians and frisky French people on the Boulevard Pomare,
wondering what I would see, and fifteen minutes later I heard the first distant
syncopation of the parade, a French army band playing the First World War song
Aupres de ma blonde (il fait beau blah-blah...) - strange in almost any
circumstances, but especially bizarre on an island of dusky dark-haired people.
There followed a regiment of Marine Fusiliers carrying a French flag lettered
Honneur et Patrie and about fifty men from the Special Forces holding
hi-tech weapons. The "Regiment du Tonkin" band seemed harmless enough, but the
oncoming ranks grew increasingly menacing - three units of legionnaires with
fixed bayonets, and one with a French flag down the muzzle of his rifle, a
black-beret regiment with fierce dogs in personnel carriers and more
infantrymen, followed by men from the Foreign Legion, all of them bearded and
wearing white leather aprons and white gauntlets, and each man shouldering -
because this was the symbol of this unit of sappers - a wicked axe. The word
Camarone was inscribed on the flag of these marching men, commemorating a
battle in Mexico in 1863 in which a detachment of sixty-five legionnaires with
their backs to the wall faced an army of 2,000 Mexicans and, refusing to
surrender, were wiped out by the admiring yet remorseless enemy. This was the
battle in which the famous Captain Danjou lost not only his life but his wooden
hand (it was later retrieved and became a sort of Foreign Legion relic and
talisman). "Life" - not courage - abandoned these French soldiers," was the
official summing-up, and the event ent4ered the language in the form of a
colloquialism - "faire Camarone" means to fight to the end.

I had the feeling that these parading regiments had
been chosen for their ferocity. Anyone watching them pass by would think twice
about mounting a revolt or starting an uprising, and so the Bastille Day parade,
the so-called Festival of Tahiti - this part of it, at least - was unambiguously
intimidating to the Polynesians, who watched in complete silence, even when the
wives and children of the French soldiers were applauding. The French Foreign
Legionnaires are very thick on the ground in Polynesia. Their toughness and
intransigence are needed in such a sensitive place, and the romantic pose suits
their swashbuckling image. I was told that they often take Tahitian mistresses.
Owing to an indifferent diet and their love of snacks and sweet drinks,
Tahitians frequently have bad teeth. The legionnaires' first - or perhaps second
- demonstration of their love is to buy their Tahitian girlfriend a set of false
teeth. You can often spot these spoken-for girls on the public trucks, sitting
and smiling a lovely white smile. When the legionnaire goes back to France (and
it might well be to revisit the wife and children he left behind) he takes his
girlfriend's teeth with him, so as to leave her less attractive to men.

"Sometimes the girl does not want to give her teeth
back," a legionnaire told me in Papeete. "Then we turn her upside down and shake
them out of her."

The second part of the parade was much friendlier and
less deadly-looking. It began with fire trucks and local school bands, and
continued with majorettes and kids in cowboy hats, and Miss Tahiti, who was
carried in an outrigger canoe by six muscular men. "Smile, woman," the islander
in front of me called out in French to Miss Tahiti. Twenty-eight women in white
muumuus, twelve in purple, a gang of drummers, dancers wearing feather
head-dresses and coconut-shell brassieres, trick cyclists, the fat and
wicked-looking men on motorcycles flying a skull-and-crossbones flag reading "Le
Club Harley-Davidson du Tahiti," and local kids doing handstands on skateboards
- and now the Tahitian cheered, yelling from balconies and clinging to tree
branches beside the boulevard, and I kept imagining a painting - full of Oceanic
colour and tropical light, and packed with chubby islanders and children and
large laughing families, and severe and authoritarian-looking French soldiers,
called "Bastille Day in Papeete," illustrating the paradoxes of French
colonialism.

This happy back half of the parade put me in a better
mood and I followed a sniggering group of Tahitians through the side-streets and
into the fenced-in garden of the French High commission, where a garden party
was in progress under a huge Polynesian tree. Half of us had clearly crashed the
party, and the rest - the VIPs, the beefy-faced faranis and colons in
tight suits and the threadbare old soldiers wearing heroic clusters of medals
and battle ribbons, and one conspicuously decorated with the Legion of Honor -
were too drunk to notice us. "This France Libre was given to me by
General de Gaulle," one elderly man told me, and other old soldiers - some were
African and some Vietnamese - had seen action in Indo-China in the 1950s. The
Tahitians especially were having a grand time: they ignored the waitresses with
drinks and made a beeline for the hors-d'oevres, which they managed with
wonderful dexterity, scooping up three or four at a time, squeezing them between
two fingers, and cramming them into their mouths.

A French army band set up their music stands in the
shade of the tree and perspired and played rousing songs, Sang et Or, and Tenth
Festival, and Adios Amigos, and the stirring Marche des Mousquetaires Noirs,
while the bandleader conducted them without a baton, using only his hands, the
slapping gestures of a man making a sandcastle. For the people watching the
parade or in this festival garden, Bastille Day in Tahiti was an excuse for a
party, to play games at the funfair in the park, and buy balloons and amuse the
kids. But walking back to the wharf along the rue du General de Gaule I saw a
wall urgently spraying-painted with the word INDEPENDENCE.

The next day I went to Moorea, in search of Mimi
Theroux. The ferry left from a wharf on Papeete Harbour - and as it entered the
Sea of the Moon I looked back and saw the great greeny-black crags of Tahiti's
volcanoes. They weren't rounded and plumb and undulant, but like a starved
sierra, like the corpses of mountains, with bony protruding ridges and hard
sharp hips and shoulders, narrow valleys with hollow sides, knobs and angles on
the escarpments and an intense steepness all over them, as though in their
ancient years of vulcanism they had hurled out their life and left themselves
exhausted. The peaks and slopes of Tahiti - and of volcanic islands all over
Oceania - are so steep and dark and so thoroughly wicked-looking that the coasts
by contrast are gentle, and their pale pretty lagoons seem unutterably sweet.
There is always a scrap of mist around the peaks, and sometimes a great torn
pillow of black closed hovering. The vertical roughness is visible on these
islands, but so is the mildness of their fringes. "Seen from the sea, the
prospect is magnificent," Melville wrote of this same view of Tahiti. His words
are still true. "Such enchantment, too, breathes over the whole, that it seems a
fairy world, all fresh and blooming from the hand of the Creator."

It cost seven dollars each way for the one-hour trip,
and no charge for my collapsible boat. Most of the passengers were Polynesian,
either full-blooded or else part-French, the people known locally as demi
or afa, have attached themselves to the islands. The Polynesians were of
two distinct physical types - either slender and nimble (the children and
teenagers), or else (the over-twenties) fat and rather shapeless. Girls and boys
were equally winsome, and men and women were precisely the same shape and almost
indistinguishable. It ought to have been possible to paddle my own boat from
Papeete to Moorea, but the wind discouraged me, a strong current ran between the
islands, and apart from the ferry landing at Vaiare there was only one break in
the reef. Avarapa Pass, on the northeast side of the island. The reefs of these
islands were a great disincentive to any sort of casual boating, and as I
intended to sail for the Marquesas within a week I could not mount the sort of
expedition that had gotten me safely around the archipelago of Vava'u in Tonga.
I planned to make camp on Moorea, to paddle within the reef, and to seek out
Mimi Theroux.

There is no town near the ferry landing, there is
hardly a village, and after the trucks had taken the ferry passengers away
Vaiare seemed deserted.

"I'm looking for a place on the shore to camp."
I said to a Moorean at the roadside.

"Not possible," he said - and he was
sympathetic.

It was a Polynesian problem, all the land was spoken
for. I did not argue. I rented a motorcycle and went in search of a hotel with a
beach, but this was an easy matter. Moorea had many hotels, and business was so
terrible I could take my pick. When I had settl3ed this, I went back to the
rental place for my boat. But I kept my motorcycle. I rode to the Hotel Bali Hai
and found the manager, who seemed to be American. Yes, he said, Mimi Theroux had
worked here not long ago, but she had left.

"She lives with her mother at Paopao."

that was Cook's Bay, not far off.

"Is she married?"

"I never saw any husband," the man said, and he
described her house so that I could find it.

It was a white building, but it was not a
house. Large and square, two storeys, with verandas above and a restaurant
below, and with a flat roof, it had the geometric look of a commercial
structure. but it was in good condition, freshly painted, gleaming in the
sunshine, and facing directly onto the bay. I parked my motorcycle and
walked around. A Tahitian was tinkering behind the building, but as it was
high noon and very hot there were few other people in sight.

"Mimi Theroux?" I asked the Tahitian.

He pointed upstairs, to the porch where laundry was
hung. I looked on the door at the foot of the stairway, but there was no
response. I knocked again, and excited a dog in the next yard. I called out, and
a young woman appeared at the top of the stairs.

This was Mimi. She was Chinese. I told her my name and
she invited me up the stiars where, at the top, a small dark child was playing
with an older girl.

"This is Moea," Mimi said, hoisting the smaller child.

"Your daughter?"

"Soon she will be." She spoke English with a slight
American accent.

We were walking through the cool interior of the upper
floor where, at the far end on the front of the building, I could see the blaze
of the sea and the glarey sky of Cook's Bay - one of the most beautiful spots in
the whole of Oceania, lovely, secluded, dramatic and rather empty. But this was
French Polynesia. Because it was secluded it was neglected; the beach was no
good, the shore was littered, and if you didn't have a motorcycle how would you
get there?

It seemed to me that Mimi had a tincture of
Polynesian blood. She said that this might have been so - she vaguely
remembered seeing an elderly Tahitian relative, but she was not sure whether
this was a blood relation. I rather liked here for not being sure and for
not caring much about it. "I'm sorry to drop in on you like this," I said.

"It's okay. Jim has spoken about you."

She explained that she was married to James
Theroux, who was a distant cousin of mine and, as he had spent years sailing
back and forth across the Pacific, from Samoa to Fiji and Tonga, to Port
Vila and Australia, Jim was well known in Oceania. He was an expert surfer
and experienced sailor and navigator. His name had been mentioned to me and
sometimes, introducing myself to a yacht-owner, I was mistaken for him.
People knew his boat in the way they knew my books: just names that had
become familiar.

"He is in Australia, at the moment, in the
Whitsundays, taking charters," Mimi said. "I saw him seven months ago. Maybe
I will see him again in a few months. He is like you, always travelling."

"Does he look like me?" I asked.

"No. He is more handsome," Mimi said, and went
to chase Moea, who was throwing toys at the wall.

Mimi was relaxed, she seemed capable, she was
slender and barefoot, wearing a pareu on her hips; a loyal and
energetic Chinese who did not make a fuss about a seven-month separation.
She was small, quick and attractive. After she told me a few details of her
life I figured her age to be thirty-four. She had met Jim when she was
twenty-one, at the girls' college in Punaauia, on Tahiti. Her maiden name
was Tshan-lo.

"Jim said, 'Come with me,' so I went. yes, it was
romantic," Mimi said. "He had a boat. I had never been on a boat like that
before. First we went to Pago, and I was sick, from the sea. Then we went to
Fiji, Vava'u, Vila, Australia. We were in Vila for a couple of years, but when
independence came there was trouble." - the Jimmy Stevens uprising - "and we
left. In Vava'u the Tongans stole our laundry from the lines. but we liked it.
Jim fished with the local people in the night."

"Do you still get seasick?"

"No. Now I am a good sailor. I have done it for
more than ten years," Mimi said.

Each phase of her life had been difficult, and she was
one of those people who seemed to have been strengthened and made confident by
the sudden changes. It seemed to me Chinese tenacity, but in this Polynesian
setting - in the beauty of Paopao - it had no edge to it. She had travelled from
Moorea to Tahiti, she had gone off and married this impulsive American; and they
had sailed the seas together. In Australia Jim sold his boat and then, hearing
that Alan bond's twelve-meter yacht Southern Cross was for sale, they flew to
Perth and bought it. It was a wonderful boat but it was empty. They rigged it
and sailed it across the top of Australia, through the Torres Strait and past
Cape York to Cairns. that took a year, because they had spent all their money
buying and refitting the boat.

"We stopped in many places - to work and make money.
But they were interesting places," Mimi said. "In Darwin we stopped for months.
I worked as a waitress and Jim, was a gardener. We didn't mind. It was an
adventure." Moea was still running around the oom wither her little friend. The
room was large and breezy, with a few pictures - Jim's yacht was one - and some
calendars and plain furniture. It was clean and more pleasant for being mostly
bare.

"Moea is very pretty," I said.

"Soon she will be a Theroux," Mimi said.

Seeing the impish face of this little islander
and hearing my own name made me glad.

"Her mother is a Marquesan," Mimi said. "My
sister knew her mother when she was pregnant, and she knew that I could not
have a child myself and that I wanted to adopt one. The woman already had
two children and no husband. You know how it is here. Anyway, as soon as she
had the baby she gave it tome. She told me the father is French, but look at
her - that baby is Marquesan - very black hair and dark eyes and skin."

Mimi turned to the child with admiration. Moea was a
very sweet, very strong and upright two-year-old, and happy, her laughter
ringing in the room, as she played.

"The father went afterwards to the woman and asked,
'Where is the baby'" Mimi went on. "But the woman said, 'ou didn't come the
whole time I was pregnant. I gave the baby away.'"

"Where had the man been?"

"The man just left her and ran after a young girl when
the baby was in the stomach," Mimi said. "That was two years ago. I have been
happy. but now I am getting worried. In the past weeks the mother has been
calling me. I know that if she was Moea she will take her. She signed the
document for adoption but it does not become final until two months more. I have
to hide. The woman does not know where I am, but somehow she knows my telephone
number. I would never give Moea away. She was such a lot of work when she was
small, but she is so intelligent and she understands everything I say."

We were seated at a table, looking past Paopao to the
bay.

"It is so lovely here," I said.

"It is a picture postcard views," Mimi said.
"You should have seen the sunset last night. The sky was all pink - no sun,
just clouds and sky. I sat here and watched it with Moea."

I was touched by the thought that after seeing
twelve and a half thousand sunsets in the Pacific she still marvelled at
one. Suddenly she said, "How did you find me?"

"I asked at the Bali Hai. You know you were
nominated for a Mauruuru Award?"

"No," she said without much interest. And then
she called out to her mother. Was she conveying this news?

Her elderly mother, Madame Madeline Tshan-lo,
was seated silently on the porch, looking off to sea. Mimi did not know the
sold woman's age - she said it was impolite to ask. Madame Tshan-lo had had
nine children, of whom Mimi was the youngest ("I am the runt"). All the rest
were married - to French, American, Tahitian, Chinese - and they lived all
over, in many countries. The old woman smiled at me and spoke in Cantonese
to her daughter. "Give that man some food," she said. Mimi went to
th4ekitchen and brought me a plate of vegetable stew - carrots from New
Zealand, potatoes from France, rice from China. You needed a garden in order
to live, Mimi said. There was no work, she said, but man y people got by on
breadfruit and taro and mangoes. Talking about food, Mimi remarked on the
high cost of living.

"We have the most expensive electricity in the
world," she said. "Every month I can't believe the bill. It costs me fifteen
thousand francs a month, for just a TRV, a freezer, a fridge and lights."

That was $160.

"They want to give us income tax, but everything is
taxed! That is why it costs so much to live here."

The reason there was no income tax was because people
were taxed on the things they bought. Tax had been reduced on alcohol in order
to encourage tourism, but that had not done the trick.

"Three weeks ago there was a roadblock in Tahiti,
because they raised the petrol ten cents and the diesel twenty cents."

This was a few days before I had arrived but people
were still talking about it and marvelling at the disruption it had caused. The
roadblock of bulldozers and trucks had been put up just outside of Papeete,
between the town and the airport, so that in order to get to the airport it was
necessary to take a ninety-mile (117 kilometer) detour around the island. No one
was arrested. There were negotiations, and at last the government reduced the
price. What was clear in most people's mind was that if it happened again, if
the government passed an unpopular measure, roadblocks were the answer - though
in the past (as recently as 1987) the government had used riot police against
protesters.

"What about the French?" I asked. "Do you think they'll
hang on here?"

"Good question," Mimi said. "Eventually we will be
independent, I suppose."

I left Mimi, admiring her strength and her filial
piety, and I mounted my motorcycle and went the rest of the way around the
island. It was a stormy month - three or four times I was caught in a downpour,
either in my boat or on the motorcycle - and so I was not sorry to be denied the
chance to live in my tent. The raindrops pelted so hard they stung my skin. And
after the rain there was always a lovely aroma of tiare and oleander, and
enormous complete rainbows, every color in a whole archway.

One day I paddled to Maarea, Melville had lived for a
while here in 1842, and he mentions it a number of times in Omoo ("Fair dawned,
over the hills of Martair, the jocund morning"). It had been a long trip for me,
because I had stoipped at a little island called Motu Ahi. And when I was caught
in the rain on the way back I headed for the shelter of a little beach, where -
sheltering with me under a tree - was a cyclist, Dominic Taemu, who was in his
twenties and pedalling around the island.

We talked about Bastille Day and the Heiva Tahiti.
He laughed.

"Bastille Day. That is a French festival. That is
historical. It is not our day."

"Do you want Polynesia to be independent?"

"How can we be independent? We have no resources," he
said. "The Japanese have taken all our big fish - they come in their big ships
and use drift nets. We had lots of fish before, but now they are small and few.
The coconuts and the copra re nothing. We have nothing."

"What about other work?"

"There is no work, because there are too few tourists,"
he said. And he thought awhile. "We know other places are cheaper. For us this
is a big problem. We don't know what to do."

It was the fear of destitution, the fear of losing
French prosecution and aid. But it was perhaps like a woman anxious about
divorcing, fearing to be alone, without support - even though the husband is in
opportunist and an exploiter.

"Independence - yes, certain people want it. It might
come. But what will we do then?" And it dramatized the paradox of French
Polynesia that Taemu, a native of what has been called the most beautiful place
on earth, then said, "We have no means to live."

An extract of
the text from THE HAPPY ISLES OF OCEANIA by Paul Theroux, published in
London by Hamish Hamilton, 1992.